Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. His works are widely acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music. Even today his birthday is celebrated internationally with the largest festivities in Germany of course. Mozart is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers and many consider him to be the greatest composer of all time.

Mozart was born on January 27, 1756 in Salzburg, which is now part of Austria. It wasn’t long before Mozart’s natural talents became evident. At age three Wolfgang began learning the violin, clavier, and organ under the guide of his father, Leopold Mozart. Leopold was one of Europe’s predominant music instructors, but he stopped composing so he could dedicate his attention to Mozart’s training. By age five Mozart was recognized as a prodigy and was invited to play private concerts for royalty across Europe. 1761 was also the year that Mozart released his first two compositions. Mozart enjoyed a successful career releasing more than 600 compositions before his death on December 5th, 1791.

Mozart’s works spanned a period of transformation that ultimately incorporated some of the contrapuntal complexities of the late Baroque. Mozart’s own stylistic development closely paralleled the development of the classical style as a whole, however his works were also draped with a faint foreshadowing of the Romantic era to come. He was a versatile composer and wrote in almost every major genre, including symphony, opera, solo concerto, chamber music including string quartet and string quintet, and the piano sonata. While none of these genres were new, the piano concerto was almost single-handedly developed and popularized by Mozart. The central traits of the classical style can all be identified in Mozart’s music. Clarity, balance, and transparency are hallmarks, though a simplistic notion of the delicacy of his music obscures for us the exceptional and even demonic power of some of his finest masterpieces. As Charles Rosen said in The Classical Style, “It is only through recognizing the violence and sensuality at the center of Mozart’s work that we can make a start towards a comprehension of his structures and an insight into his magnificence. In all of Mozart’s supreme expressions of suffering and terror, there is something shockingly voluptuous.”